Le Corbusier Furniture

Written by Nicholas Kamuda

Like his buildings, Le Corbusier furniture is generally elegant combinations of planes and lines, and is generally full of forms that somehow appear simultaneously blocky and weightless. The buildings often rest on stilts or thrust up massive concrete walls, and his chairs often consist of large geometric forms resting on elegant tubular steel frames. Other pieces of Le Corbusier furniture are lighter, consisting of stretched fabric on steel frames.

Two Popular Le Corbusier Furniture Designs

Le Corbusier's furniture designs embody his idea that a house should be a machine made for living. The Grand Comfort chair, one of the largest chairs that he produced, encompasses the user with rich, black leather into which they can sink and relax. It's wide frame but elegant footprint is reminiscent of many of his building designs.

The Chaise Lounge is engineered for relaxation, as well, and features a sinuous leather pad resting on tubular steel arcs. Under weight, the arcs bend slightly, offering the user a feeling of weightlessness without any instability. The whole lounge rests comfortably on four steel legs.

Though Le Corbusier furniture is reputed for its high quality, his contributions as an urban planner (and sometimes, as an architect) remain hotly disputed. Brilliant but sparse, his urban designs would appear bleak and uniform if not for the subtleties imbued in their forms. The main complaint against them is that they are impractical towards pedestrians. By extension, they are far too rational for some (despite the humanism central to Le Corbusier's work); too pure in design and function for the increasingly variant styles of living that became popular towards the end of the 20th century.